you’re doing it wrong May 8, 2009

It is very rare that someone wants to take on extra work. In fact, without being voluntold, it’s highly likely that you’ll only take on extra projects if:

Your job depends on it (that is, you have no choice in the matter).

You’re exceedingly passionate about the subject matter (I have done one of these).

You know it’ll be done wrong if you aren’t involved (the most likely).

As the Two-Year-Old has entrenched herself more firmly, she’s begun changing things around CorporateSpeak. Some changes have been for the better, but many have been for the worse. One of them was halving the web department and instead making everyone in her department responsible for their own web content.

This has not been successful. Unless you are trained for all the little things we do to make our websites better, you’re going to screw up. Maybe not intentionally, but you will screw up. You’ll make mistakes in one of the two CMSes. You’ll promise things we can’t do. You’ll make an effort but fall short. And each time you screw up, one of the two of us still populating the web department will have to fix things for you. Even the best two of the Two-Year-Old’s employees have things they get wrong.

Then there are those who get it wrong on purpose.

Remember yesterday I talked about Wally? In my first footnote, I noted that Wally not only doesn’t bother to even try to do his web duties correctly, but when he’s got other things to do, he doesn’t bother doing them at all. Instead he just expects that someone will wave a magic internet wand and the content will appear all nice and pretty.

It won’t, Wally. And you know that, so you make a half-hearted effort because you also know that when we see the crap you smear on the internet, we’re compelled to make it better to cover our own asses.

The policy gets us coming and going; if we don’t do your work for you, we get in trouble because it’s missing, but if you do it half-assedly, we get in trouble because we didn’t fix it.

Oh, and we trained you. Three times. You still don’t care. No one around here does. If it’s not a traditional means of getting the job done, it doesn’t matter.

What sucks the most is that Wally is actually very good at what he does (when it doesn’t involve the internet), so he’s requested fairly often on big projects. Big project, big visibility, big problems if we don’t wipe your ass for you.

You’re doing it wrong. You know you’re doing it wrong, and you don’t care. You know you can get away with doing it wrong because you know there’s zero accountability around here. Combine that with your cannon-firing earlier in the week and you’re quickly turning me and mine against you.